Game Research
From their website: "Game Research attempts to bring together knowledge on computer games from the areas of art, business, and science. Traditionally such cross-communication has been sparse to the detriment of all involved."

M.J. Mayo (2007). Games for science and engineering education. Commun. ACM 50, 7 (Jul. 2007), 30-35.
This is an encouraging reflection on the potential for online gaming to help increase science education levels of American students. The paper cites recent data and provides a nice framework for structuring one's thinking about the cognitive aspects of multiplayer games.

Examples of Online Games, Environments, and Platforms

The purpose of these applets, animations and activities is to help the user better understand concepts presented in the textbook "Meteorology: Understanding the Atmosphere," by Steven A. Ackerman and John A. Knox. The applets supplement materials from this textbook, usually as optional in-depth explorations of advanced topics. Several dozen applets cover topics ranging from the weather map to numerical models. Applets allow the user to explore these topics interactively, to develop a deeper understanding of the concepts, and to solve complex equations without knowing anything about higher mathematics.

From their website: "The Internet Archive, a non-profit institution based in San Francisco which also hosts the Wayback Machine and many important audio, video and webpage collections, is working with multiple external parties, including the IGDA's Preservation SIG and Stanford University's How They Got Game Project to preserve all kinds of rare and difficult to source video files relating to video games."

Ideas for Teaching with Online Games

Michael Kelly, Geology Department, Northern Arizona UniversityIdea: A Geologic History simulation would allow students to explore a block terrain, and extract information from it using virtual tools. The exploration would take place at scales from a "birds eye" viewpoint of the entire terrain down to a 1:1 scale where the avatar body size would be scaled to real objects on the terrain. The purpose of the investigation would be to combine pre-existing geologic data with new data to build a geologic history of the terrain. The kind of data they would be able to extract from the terrain includes diagnostic fossils, raw isotopic measurements and basic rock types. A suite of terrains could be used in guided instruction, exploration and assessment.Topic: Geologic TimePlatform: Multiuser, virtual environmentAdvantages:The advantages of the approach include:
1) The activity could be completed by a team of cooperating students in a class period or by one student over a longer period of time.
2) The actions and movement of individual students could be tracked as an indicator of approach and possibly as an assessment. This could help delineate group learning form individual learning.
3) Instructors could guide students through the activity, allowing the process of doing geology to be revealed from expert to novice.Goals: Overall this activity speaks to the mastery of a students understanding of the concepts of geologic history. Specifically the students should be able to describe a pattern of the rocks appearing on the surface or sides of the block, and describe the geologic units that make up the pattern. Next they should be able to determine the order in which the units formed, and where and when relatively that features such as faults formed. From the kind of data they collect using the virtual tools they should be able to place units in a framework of the geologic time scale, and be able to summarize the geologic history by arranging different events in order.Assessment: The goals could be assessed by comparing the students list of geologic events to the known list of events for the terrain. A more complex assessment could include and analysis of the student's time and activities as well as detailed worksheets that showed student fossil correlations or radiometric age calculations. Another possible complex assessment would be via student recorded and narrated video tours of the terrain describing their final list of events.

October 15-17, 2017
Carleton College, Northfield, MN
To address the need to strengthen computational skills, this workshop will bring together faculty from the sciences who teach computation and are interested in strengthening their skills and developing MATLAB-based teaching resources. Application deadline: September 8, 2017

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